


Alone

by whiteduck6



Category: Z Nation (TV)
Genre: Ableism, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Emotional Hurt, Gen, autistic 10k, but it's super subtle, this is a sad one boys
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-04
Updated: 2018-10-04
Packaged: 2019-07-24 21:39:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,269
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16183694
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/whiteduck6/pseuds/whiteduck6
Summary: Why does 10k have such abandonment issues?Here's why.





	Alone

**Author's Note:**

> I know this one is a little shorter than normal, but I wanted to explore some of the internalized ableism/sense of "everyone's going to leave me in the end" feelings that 10k had in my last fic. 
> 
> Here's some notes for how I'm thinking this timeline will go:
> 
> 10k mostly refers to himself as Tommy in this fic. I imagine he doesn't start calling himself 10k until a little later in the apocalypse. I haven't gotten to the episode where it goes into detail about 10k killing his dad, but I know it happens, I'm thinking that this fic takes place about one year into the apocalypse. In my head, 10k starts referring to himself as 10k maybe a year and a half or two years into the apocalypse. That's why he refers to himself as 10k at the end.
> 
> Anyway, sorry for that infodump. Enjoy!

The first people Tommy meets after his pa are a couple, a man and a woman named Jack and Ellen.

He’s sleeping on a rooftop when they wake him up, Ellen crouching by him and looking worried and Jack with his hand on a revolver at his hip. 

“Are you okay?” Ellen asks. “My name is Ellen. That’s my husband, Jack.”

“I’m fine,” Tommy says. He starts to gather his stuff. 

“Where are you going?” Ellen says. “You’re just a kid. You’re by yourself. Come with us.”

“Ellen, a word?” Jack pulls her a little ways away. Not far enough. 

“We can’t pick up every straggler we find,” he hisses, his arms folded over his chest. 

“He’s a kid,” Ellen says, planting her hands on her hips. “Have a little heart.”

“If that kid is out here by himself, he must have done something to get kicked out of his group.”

“What if everyone in his group died?”

“How did he survive? There has to be something wrong with him, to be alone out here.”

Tommy pulls his bag over his shoulder — he doesn’t have much, it’s full of his fleece, two water bottles, and four Clif bars — and picks up his gun and starts making his way towards the stairs leading through the building. 

“Wait, where are you going?” Ellen asks. 

Tommy looks at her. Does this really require explanation?

“Is this because of what Jack said? Oh, no, honey, don’t worry about him. He’s nervous, but he’ll warm up to you. We have a car. Do you need a ride?”

Tommy shrugs. He doesn’t really want to travel with these people, but he can get some good travel time in if he goes by car. Sleeping on a soft place might be nice, too. 

“Come with me,” Ellen says, putting a hand on his shoulder. Tommy slithers out from under her grasp, and she puts her hands up.

“Okay, okay,” she says, “that’s fine.”

Tommy follows them to their car, keeping a hand on the knife resting on his belt. They seem normal enough, but you can never be too safe. 

“What’s your name, honey?” Ellen asks as Jack starts the car. 

“It’s not,” Tommy mumbles.

“Sorry, you’re gonna have to speak up, I didn’t quite catch that!”

“My name’s . . . not honey.”

“O-oh,” Ellen looks a little startled now. “No, no, I didn’t—it’s a nickname. Can you tell us what your real name is?”

Tommy shrugs. He’s not about to give out his real name to a random couple, no matter how nice they seem.

Jack gives Ellen a look Tommy is familiar with, the look parents have been giving his pa all his life. The look of _What’s wrong with him?_

“We’re gonna have to call you something,” Ellen says, and turns on the radio. A CD is playing, some violin track, and the harsh sound grates across his ears. He lays his gun lengthwise in his lap and tries to subtly cover his ears. 

Ellen either doesn’t notice, or doesn’t care. Tommy presses his cheek to the window and closes his eyes, trying to make himself fall asleep.

He doesn’t fall asleep, but at one point he hears the sound of the CD sliding out of the player.

_Thank god,_ he thinks to himself, _One more second of that and I would have gone crazy._

Some hip-hop type song starts playing. Tommy doesn’t recognize it — he didn’t listen to a lot of music, pre-z, and there wasn’t much way to listen to it safely after — but the heavy bass makes him want to yank the door open and fling himself onto the road, risking road-rash and the sensory hell that comes with it to escape this bass-heavy prison.

He presses his hands flat against his ears and breathes deeply, low in his throat so the white noise blocks out anything else. He considers closing his eyes to really complete the blankness he’s trying to create but he doesn’t trust Jack and Ellen’s instincts that much. 

Jack glances back at him in the rearview mirror and Tommy can see his lips moving, but he can’t really hear through his hands. He wouldn’t be able to hear him over the music in all likelihood, anyway. It wasn’t terribly loud, but Tommy had awful hearing when there was more than one sound in the area.

Ellen gives Jack an annoyed look, then turns to Tommy. She slowly signs _OK?_

_Headache,_ Tommy signs, raising his index fingers so they’re parallel to his eyebrows and moving them inward a couple times. 

Ellen gives him a blank look.

_Well, that was too good to be true,_ Tommy thinks to himself. 

He shifts a little so that he doesn’t have to look anyone in the face and tries to sleep.

Eventually, he sort of acclimatizes to the pounding bass. It gets even better when Jack turns it off. Tommy takes his hands off his ears, but doesn’t open his eyes.

“This was a mistake,” Jack says, very quietly. Tommy has awful hearing when there’s background noise but phenomenal hearing when it’s silent, so it’s not hard for him to pick up the conversation.

“Don’t you dare, Jack, don’t even think about—“

“We can find another car.”

There’s a long silence before Ellen speaks again.

“We are not just _abandoning_ him here!”

“Where are we taking him, then, Ellen? Because we don’t exactly have much direction ourselves.”

“He’s a kid, Jack,” Ellen says, sounding exasperated. Tommy mentally goes over if he has enough supplies until the next town, if they decide to drop him on the side of the road. 

“He’s baggage,” Jack says, “he’s baggage we don’t need. Carry only the necessities, isn’t that right?”

“He’s a kid, Jack,” Ellen repeats, but she sounds a little less sure this time. 

Tommy opens his eyes. 

“Jesus!” Jack says as soon as he notices Tommy looking at him. He swerves violently, clipping a stray zombie and tearing its arm off. 

“How long have you been awake?” Ellen asks. Tommy gives her a blank look.

Her eyes soften. “I’m sorry about Jack, honey, he can be stubborn. But you can stay for as long as you need, okay?”

He shrugs and looks back at the road. They’ve slowed to a crawl.

“Gas,” Jack mutters, pulling the car over to the side of the road. 

Tommy hops out as soon as he gets the opportunity. He clambers onto the roof of the car, crouching and looking down his scope at the horizon.

“What the—?” Jack says, but doesn’t say anything else. 

After Tommy’s done scanning the horizon, he climbs off the car. He doesn’t actually know how to siphon gas — it was one thing his pa always did, and since then Tommy’s traveled on foot or, on one occasion, by bicycle. It was quieter than cars, anyways, and he liked it like that. Get in, get out, quick, quiet. Stay alive.

He spots a house nearby and jogs off in its direction. He rattles a window, sliding it open on creaky hinges, and slithers through it, landing unceremoniously on the carpet. A zombie groans from somewhere above him and he stabs up with his hunting knife, catching some resistance. The zombie doesn’t die, though, so as soon as Tommy gets to his feet he stabs it again, this time in the eye. It goes quiet and falls to the ground.

_114._

He goes through their selection of books — he doesn’t often have time to read, but he figures he should probably keep up the habit. There isn’t really anything, so he goes into their kitchen. 

He has to dig through a dusty pantry for a few minutes, but he comes up with a full box of Cheerios. 

He takes the bag of cereal out of the box and shoves it into his backpack. Somewhere in the back of his head it occurs to him that maybe he should be sharing food with Jack and Ellen, but he’s going to be out on his own soon enough anyway. He needs to stock up.

He doesn’t find any other food, so he bounds up their stairs to the bedrooms. It’s getting warmer, and while he’d love to just cut the sleeves off of his shirt that he wears right now, that would kind of ruin it for the winter. 

He runs his fingers over a man’s selection of shirts, but nothing is soft enough. It’s mostly suit shirts, and Tommy could cut the sleeves off those if he wants to look like a total redneck, but he hates the feeling of clothes with no stretch. 

He does find a spare pair of shoelaces, so he sticks them in his pocket and looks over the rest of the room.

He doesn’t really find anything. No bullets, no water, no food other than the Cheerios. 

He leaves through the same window he entered in and finds Jack pacing in front of his car. He’s got his arms crossed and his lips are moving, but Tommy can’t hear what he’s saying. Ellen is a few feet away from him, her hands on her hips, looking significantly calmer.

“You’re back!” Ellen says, “where’d you get to?”

Tommy gestures at the house he was looking in.

“Find anything?”

Tommy feels bad for lying, but he shakes his head. If these two have survived out on their own for this long, surely they know what they’re doing. They don’t need help.

“Jack couldn’t find any gas,” Ellen smiles apologetically, “so we’re hoofing it from here.”

Jack takes off. Ellen follows hastily. Tommy sort of half-jogs behind them. He glances back every once in a while, managing to blow a little gear through a stray zombie’s head at one point. 

_115._

They stop for the night in an old bank. The banks were forgotten as robbery targets pretty early on in the apocalypse when it became evident that money wasn’t going to be valuable for much longer. They hunker down behind a counter and 10k tries not to fiddle around with his clothes too much.

He has a pair of those oval magnets that clatter together, and he doesn’t use them often because the noise is an issue, but there aren’t any zees around and he’s behind thick walls. He digs them out of the depths of his bag and messes with them for a while, trying to keep the clacking down as much as he can.

“You keep magnets on you?” Jack asks, raising an eyebrow. Tommy stares a challenge back at him.

Eventually he gets hungry, and he opens up his bag of cereal and eats a little. It’s dry and uncomfortable without milk, but it’s sweet and not too crunchy and, most importantly, it’s fresh.

At least, relatively so. It’s not noticeably stale.

When he’s finished, he shuts the bag with one of those bag clips. It was a surprisingly useful find — amazing how multipurpose stuff can be.

He takes first watch — Tommy always has trouble falling asleep anyway — sitting cross-legged on the counter with his gun draped across his knees. It’s dark, so dark that he can barely see what’s going on inside the building. Outside, there’s just enough moonlight to make out shapes. 

He can tell what’s moving and what’s not.

That’s good enough.

He steps outside to knife a zombie that strays a little close at one point, but it doesn’t have any friends. He goes back inside and keeps watch until he gets tired, then he wakes up Ellen and settles in under a counter, pulling his fleece out of his bag and wrapping it around himself. He normally wouldn’t sleep with it, but the floor is cold, and Tommy knows he’s going to wake up as soon as he feels Jack’s eyes on him.

He might as well make the most of what little sleep he gets.

—

He’s ripped from his sleep by a nightmare, a scream dying in his throat as he jerks awake so fast he hits his head on the underside of the counter.

He winces, rubs his forehead, then winces more when he feels gum in his hair. It must have been on the counter where his head hit it. 

He saws the offending piece of hair off with his knife. 

He rubs sleep out of his eyes, the nightmare already dissipating. He knows what it’s about, though.

What else do you dream about when you’ve killed your father?

He stretches his arms out, his shoulders cracking as he flexes them as far as they can go. He looks around and finds that no one else is around.

He steps outside, but no one’s there. He brushes his teeth — one thing his pa had drilled into his head even post-z was the habit of brushing your teeth — and looks around the perimeter of the building. 

No one’s there.

“Ellen?” He asks, too quietly for anyone to hear. He knows what’s happened. It happened to him and his pa, after the group of survivors from Tommy’s high school invited them to travel with them. 

He tries not let the heavy press of emotion weigh on him. He checks his bullets, gets all his things together, and carries on his way.

He never really liked Jack anyway.

—

Two years later, he saves an old man’s life by shooting a zombie in the head on top of a school.

A few hours after that, the old man says he wants to thank him, offers him a ride. 

10k accepts. He’s pretty sure this will end up like Jack and Ellen.

By some miracle, it doesn’t.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! I feel like this fic cut off a little suddenly, what do you think? I didn't really want to put too much ableism in here so I tried to keep it subtle, and I didn't want to torture my son any longer, so this isn't a terribly long fic. 
> 
> As always, constructive criticism is welcomed and appreciated!


End file.
